Teaching Development at Leuphana

Leuphana's specific study model stands for innovative teaching with a high quality standard that clearly goes beyond mere quality assurance in the sense of minimum standards. Teaching development is therefore a continuous joint task at the heart of Leuphana's self-image and is implemented with the participation of many actors at different levels and with interlocking components.

Any concepts and approaches for university teaching manifest themselves in the concrete course, the quality of which is reflected in the learning success of the students. The essential responsibility for the design and development of demanding and high-quality teaching thus lies with the teachers, who orient their freedom of teaching to scientific standards and didactic reflection. The latter takes place primarily in exchange with students in order to jointly develop teaching further. To support this, quantitative and qualitative feedback and evaluation instruments are systematically used both at the level of the courses and at the higher levels (module, study program, university).

For some years now, incentives for teaching development have also increasingly been provided via external funding; since 2020, in particular via the newly established Innovation in University Teaching Foundation, which is a counterpart to the DFG in the area of research for the funding of teaching development. Leuphana uses corresponding calls for proposals very successfully for the acquisition of third-party funds to promote innovative projects. For teaching development projects, intensive coordination and involvement of various actors and levels is necessary to ensure the fit with goals and framework conditions at the module and program level as well as curricular and legal requirements. Analogous to the research service for research projects, teaching-related applications at Leuphana are supported and coordinated by the teaching service.

The increasing importance of third-party funding for the promotion of teaching development, but also the necessity of profiling universities in the area of teaching in conjunction with Leuphana's high quality standards for its study model, make continuous teaching development a central strategic task. Leuphana accompanies strategic teaching development with teaching governance that takes up and integrates bottom-up and top-down impulses in equal measure.